From: Gennady <gfb@...>
Date: 2003-12-17T08:43:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie questions


On Dec 16, 2003, at 15:24, Daniel Carrera wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 07:25:54AM +0900, Thomas Adam wrote:
>>  --- Daniel Carrera <dcarrera@math.umd.edu> wrote: > > >As for ri, I 
>> still
>>
>>
>>> Well... I'm thinking of man pages here.  A typical man page is a lot
>>> longer than the vertical size of a terminal, so sending the output to
>>> stdout is not, on itself, very useful.  Something that scrolls would
>>> make more sense.  The only good thing about stdout is that you can
>>> redirect the output and pipe it through grep, but you can already do
>>> that.  You can pipe and redirect man pages already as it is.
>>
>> man <some_page> | col -b | less
>>
>> man <some_page> | col -b | grep "something"
>>
>> man <some_page> | col -b > ~/my_manpage
>
>
>
> Yes, exactly.  That's what I was saying.  You can already do
> redirections and pipes with "man" so there's no point in making "man"
> send its output to stdout.

That's exactly what "man" is doing here -- sending its output to 
stdout. Stdout being a tty device is a special case for "man" -- in 
this case it invokes PAGER command and redirects its own stdout to the 
command's stdin through the pipe.

>
>

Sincerely,
Gennady Bystritsky